Look Ma - No Hands

Saturday was a wonderful day. We started off this morning going to Tumble and Tea with the “Parent’s of Special Needs Children” Meet-up group. I was most excited about meeting Sarah and Quinn as I have been reading her blog and trying to get together with her over the past few weeks. I was also excited and hoped to meet more new families, but only one other mom, Irene and her son Nathan came. They only stayed for about 30 minutes, so we didn’t get to talk with them much. But it was fun to talk with Zak, Quinn’s dad, as Joel doesn’t get to meet a lot of other dads, and of course Sarah was great, so I hope to plan more play dates with them and also go to more group meet ups. I was reading on the message boards that there are a few families with Sensory Integration issues, so hopefully next time we will meet them.

Quinn was a very happy little baby and he really was intrigued with Holly, they stared at each other both full of smiles, and Holly liked to reach out for his face, he has very cute wavy black hair which I am sure holly would have wanted to pull on if he would have let her. Quinn ran around and played on the slide and with Joel on the little piano they had there. Holly was less interested in playing and more intrigued with pulling herself up to standing and trying to walk. We had a fun time chatting about pre-schools and the various challenges we both face, and it was great to learn about the different issues each family has and how they work them out.

We were inspired by holly’s standing on her own that we decide to go to ikea and get her some large square blocks to pull up on. Sadly they didn’t have the variety we had hoped for, but we found one that was supposed to be a vouch arm. It was expensive 15 dollars for the cousin, but 25-35 for the cousin cover, and we wanted two. So we decided to get two cousins and go to the fabric store and cover then ourselves.

Ikea however is the hell mouth and we got sucked in, we had a great lunch there but ended up spending another 100 on stuff for holly. We got her a new tub that was great and 7 puppets, we just kept seeing new animals we had to have, fish, frog, zebra, reindeer, pig, dragon, cow, and horse. They were only 4$ each but they added up. Everything we got her was only a few dollars each, some rattles and a cute swimming towel that is a froggy hood and a little fish throw rug and some cute eating set and some wooden stacking blocks, but as you can see it all adds up.

Ikea is great though, they are so kid friendly, they totally redid the kids’ area and have nay more kids rooms and little kid sized furniture, we will be back there often, they had large stuffed animals and tons of toys we didn’t get. Oh we also got an amazing toy box I love it and it made me so happy to have a place to put all her toys and it is perfect height for her to pull herself up on, so works on double levels.

The other night my mom said she had a dream about me coming to visit her in Florida and that since I was at the airport myself between flights I had to go to the bathroom so I asked someone to hold holly while I did. Now of course I would never do this, but I took this picture to show my mom how holly can hold herself if I need to go to the bathroom so she doesn’t have to worry about anyone stealing her.

This other picture is of her sitting in her new bathtub and playing with toys on the table where we were eating lunch at ikea, it was perfect to contain her so she could sit and play without me having to worry about her trying to crawl off the edge of the table she was very popular and everyone complemented us n how clever it was, they said we should do a commercial for ikea on their bathtubs, she had fun.

So next we went to JoAnne fabrics where we got some snuggle flannel, it is soft and durable but not too thick and it was on sale for only 2.99 a yard. We picked two for the cousin covers and went over board and got two yards so we had extra for practice, but then I found 4 other patterns I couldn’t leave behind so I got a yard of each to make dresses for holly. Joel thinks I am jumping into the deep end, but I don’t think it will be that hard to reverse engineer a pattern from a dress she already has, and then its like getting her a new dress for only 2.99,. but mommy made it, so it’s even better. We also got some thread and a sewing book.

When we got home Joel brought up the sewing machine and learned how to use it. Just before he went to bed I wanted to try as I had an idea and wanted to make a prototype cousin cover to see if it would work, and not two seconds was I sitting there and hadn’t even done 1 line of sewing and the needle snapped. I was determined so even thought Joel was exhausted and had to go to bed, I figured out how to take it apart and replace the needle and the bobbin and fix it and then sewed my prototype. I later realized that I had loosened the needle clamp not knowing what it was right before I started to try and sew, and that’s why it broke.

So I figured out what I want to do to make the covers and once I get some more bobbins, so I don’t have to re-spin them every time for each new color I can make the cushion covers hopefully later this week.